BX 



Faith the End of Christian Teaching-. 



AST ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



PEPPEKELL, MASS., 



[to 19, 1867, 



-7 

BY ANDREW 1 PEAEODY 



187 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE COXYENTIOX 



GRGTOX JUJsCTIOX, MASS. 
PEIiXTED BY JOHN H. TTJEXEB, 
1867. 



ADDRESS. 



The end determines the means. Our present conference is de- 
signed for the interchange of views with regard to the religious 
instruction of the young. What is the end proposed ? What do 
we wish to do for our pupils, or to make of them ? This is our first 
question. This answered, we are prepared to consider the means. 

You, my friends, desire for your pupils what you most of all de- 
sire for yourselves, — what you would deem the sure source of all 
that is most blessed in character and most conducive to enduring 
happiness. I cannot be mistaken when I say, that you would, 
rather than any or all things else, be strong believers. You regard 
faith as the prime blessing of life, Grod's best gift, man's most pre- 
cious attribute, — faith in the Almighty as your Father, as exercis- 
ing a providence always wise and benignant, — faith in his law as 
universal and inevitable. — faith in Christ as a divine teacher, a 
trustworthy promiser, an all-sufficient Saviour, — faith in heaven 
and the life everlasting as the goal and destiny of a worthy life 
on earth. To have this faith as some have have had it, you would 
surrender all worldly advantages. You have felt the sore need of 
it in bereavement and in sorrow. Those of you who have passed 
the meridian of the earthly day, and are moving down its west- 
ward slope, feel that this is the paramount necessity of a life grav- 
itating rapidly toward the unseen world. When you shall stand 
consciously on the margin of the death-river, you will be calm, 
happy, jubilant, or sad, wretched, despairing, in the precise propor- 
tion in which faith or scepticism as to the great realities of the 
spiritual life predominates in your minds ; and in the cavils which 
some of you perhaps are over-ready to entertain, in the loose no- 
tions to which you perhaps accord and for which you claim the 
hospitality of an open ear and an indulgent heart, you are prepar- 



4 



ing deeper shadows for the dark days that are before you, and 
thorns for your death-pillows. 

Now what you would thus crave for yourselves, you must needs 
regard as desirable beyond all things else for your children and pu- 
pils. For faith and character are to each other as cause and effect. 
We are what we believe with the whole heart and soul and mind. 
The reason why, with us adults, there is often so wide a discrepancy 
between our professed faith and our characters is, that we only 
half believe because we began to believe too late. We believe 
with the mind, but not with the heart ; our imaginations are not con- 
vinced of the spiritual realities to which we have given an intel- 
lectual assent less full and entire than if it had been earlier given. 
But if we believe with both mind and heart, with the assent of 
the reasoning powers and the consent of the imaginative faculties, 
it is impossible that we should not live as we both believe and 
feel ; for belief and feeling are the only forces that can act on the 
will. Hence the importance of early faith, that it may be entire 
and strong, and that it may therefore bear its appropriate fruit in 
holy living, and in God's good time in holy dying. The production 
of this faith should be the foremost object of Sunday-School instruc- 
tion. 

In order to guide us in our methods, let us briefly consider 
the nature and grounds of religious belief. The first thing that 
strikes us here is the possibilhVv of unbelief, on grounds that may 
not seem utterly unreasonable. Mathematical truth, from the sim- 
plest axioms to the most recondite theorems and formulas, does 
not admit of doubt, or of counter-argument. The man who 
should deny that two and two are four, or who — having once un- 
derstood the steps of the demonstration — should den\ T that the 
square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the 
sum of the squares of the other two sides, would not be called a 
false reasoner, (for he could not have even the show of reason,) 
but simply insane or idiotic. Not so with religious truth. The 
Atheist, the Deist, the Rationalist, is not chargeable with insanity 
or idiocy. He is, as we think, a false reasoner ; nevertheless he has 
his reasons, — insufficient in our esteem, yet real, not imaginary. 
His mind may be as strong and clear as that of the Christian be- 
liever. There are reasons both for and against every truth of 
religion, even both for and against that funda*mental truth, the 
being of God. All reasoning on subjects of this class is a balancing 
of opposite arguments, — the mind giving its assent on one side or 



5 



the other according to the estimated weight of the respective ar- 
guments. 

On these subjects priority of representation has a most momen- 
tous hearing on belief. It is almost impossible to subvert an 
established belief, especially if it be of such a nature that it can 
enter into the consciousness and become incorporated with the 
character. On the other hand, it is easy to disturb a new and un- 
tried belief, even by the merest sophistry. Take the case of one 
of those saintly women such as we have all known, who through 
a long life have fed upon the Divine Word, and have themselves 
been living gospels, — let loose upon such a one all the power 
of argumentative infidelity, — ply her with Benan upon Strauss, 
and Baden Powell upon Buckle, — she probably can answer very 
few of their arguments, and they will seem to her much more 
weighty than they are or ought to be to a theological scholar; but 
they will no more shake her faith than this morning's summer- 
breeze has shaken Wachusett and Monadnock. She knows in 
whom she has believed. Her whole experience has been a prolonged 
and reiterated proof of the Divine power and excellence of Christ 
and his Gospel. The rootlets of her faith are entwined with every 
fibre of her inward life. She has literally made it Christ to live ; 
there is nothing in her or of her that is not the indwelling Christ, 
— so that to dislodge her Christian faith would be to crush her 
soul out of being. To take a different, yet not unlike case, — among 
those who cling with the utmost tenacity to the Divine element in 
the authorship of the Scriptures both Old and New, there are not 
a few who in point of biblical learning are immeasurably in ad- 
vance of Colenso and the whole brood of sceptical and unbelieving 
critics, — who take full cognizance of all the sceptical literature of 
the day, yet whose faith remains unshaken, simply because through 
early study and research it was fortified by a dense array of affirma- 
tive arguments, which are not even touched by the reasonings of 
the opposite party. But let a man begin — as our theological stu- 
dents are apt to do — with Kenan and Colenso, let him make his 
chief study of sceptical writers, with only now and then an inci- 
dental hour of reading on the other side, — he will have planted 
in his mind an invincible unbelief, so that he will be unable even 
to appreciate affirmative arguments. 

These considerations indicate, as it seems to me, the proper 
course of Sunday-School instruction. Its aim should be to preoc- 
cupy the young mind by faith, — to sow " the seed of the kingdom" 
2 



6 



before the enemy has time to come in and sow tares there. Above 
all, the Sunday-School teacher should take heed lest he be himself 
a sower of tares. I have known teachers, who, with the best de- 
sign, but with a lamentable lack of wisdom, carried into their 
classes and discussed freely with their pupils the very doubts and 
difficulties that are exercising older minds and are rife in the com- 
munity. I cannot believe that this method can have any good 
results. Many of the doubts are unanswerable, many of the diffi- 
culties unsolvable, simply because the materials for meeting them 
lie beyond our knowledge. They are to be overborne and out- 
weighed rather than answered or solved ; and it should be the 
teacher's endeavor to prepare his pupil to meet them by nurturing 
in him a faith which shall be its own evidence and argument. If 
you could directly answer all objections to the truths or the records 
of religion, it might be expedient for you to cover the whole ground 
in your instruction of the children and young persons under jout 
charge. But we who have given our lifetime to the study of these 
themes, find ourselves unable fully to resolve doubts and to answer 
objections, because they relate to subjects on which human intel- 
ligence is necessarily very limited. 

To illustrate this statement, I will take for my first instance 
that primal truth of revelation, God is Love. In antagonism to this, 
who can solve the complex problems presented by the existence of 
physical and moral evil, the former often unmerited, the latter often 
hereditary and therefore involuntary, — evil, too, that serves no 
visible purpose, and has no offset or compensation in this world. 
— evil without earthly remedy or hope ? This whole night-side 
of Providence of itself might justly awaken scepticism and feed 
infidelity ; and the wisest and most believing of us can give 
only tentative, partial, approximate solutions, which always re- 
solve themselves into St. Paul's exclamation, " How unsearchable 
are his judgments, and his ways past finding out ! " But these 
tilings do not disturb our faith, when we consider the immeasurable 
preponderance of beneficent plan, provision, causation and issue 
under the Divine administration, the boundless profusion of muni- 
ficent love in all nature, being and experience, and the eternal lite, 
in which through an omnipotent Providence, there is ample scope 
for evil to merge itself in good, for the very wrath of man to redound 
to the praise of God, and for sin — overcome and extinguished — 
to manifest in its history the wisdom, in its destruction the tri- 
umph, of redeeming love. 



7 



To take another instance, — let the miracles of the New Testa- 
ment be placed before us simply as abnormal facts, interpolations 
in the order of nature, disturbing its regular sequences, setting its 
laws at defiance ; we might well find them stumbling-blocks in the 
way of our faith, and — reason about them as we may — they can 
never cease to be to us miracles, marvels, which — isolated ■ — would 
provoke only scepticism. But when we become filled with the ful- 
ness of Christ, and find these miracles interwoven inextricably with 
the peerless beauty and glory of his life, pervaded by his spirit, rec- 
ognized in his sublimest utterances, opening ever deeper views of 
the Divine Providence and the eternal life which he taught and 
manifested, so identified with his whole being, mission, teachings 
and activity, that to separate them from him is to quench the Son 
of Righteousness in our hearts, to dethrone him whom we cannot 
but own as our Lord, and to mutilate the charter of our forgiveness 
and hope, — then these wonderful works, with the grounds of scep- 
ticism unremoved, become objects of our undoubting and rejoicing 
faith. 

Similar considerations apply to the Old Testament. There are 
many cavils at this primeval record which we have not the means 
of rebutting. It shows in some parts the lack of precision which 
belongs to an unhistorical age. There are many things in it, which 
could have their satisfactory solution only through a more intimate 
knowledge of remote antiquity than it is in our power to recover. 
There are portions which the ingenuity of subtle commentators 
only proves to be unintelligible, and from which we cannot hope 
that the veil will ever be lifted. Were this all, the Old Testa- 
ment might be fittingly left in the disrepute into which it has 
fallen with not a few superficial thinkers and critics. But who can 
account, on any other theory than that of Divine inspiration, for 
the sublime theology which pervades those wonderful books from 
the beginning to the end ; for that Decalogue, so perfect that, when 
we regard it as a summary of human duty, we know not how 
either to add to it or to take from it ; for those humane precepts issu- 
ing, if not from God, from a horde of fugitive, more than semi-savage 
slaves : for those unequaled strains of devotion struck from the lyre 
of a barbarous polygamist king ; for those lofty visions of proph- 
ecy, to rewrite which in history would be to make our world a 
heaven of peace, purity and righteousness ; — for this light of a 
lofty theistic faith, and a morality of which the Divine Redeemer 
could say, " I came not to destroy but to fulfil " or verify it, shin- 



ing out from a people of slender culture, while as to religion and 
ethics the advanced and cultivated nations sat in darkness and 
under the shadow of death, worshipping beasts, reptiles, leek-, 
blocks of stone, idealized vices, and satanic phantasies ? When 
we take these things into the account, with all our difficulties un- 
removecl, we find ourselves constrained to antedate Christianity, to 
hail the dawn and foreshining of the perfect day in long-antecedent 
ages, through patriarch, lawgiver and seer, to believe that God 
spake to the fathers by the prophets no less than to us by his Son. 

Think not that I have lost sight of the purpose for which you 
have invited me hither. My object in this digression has been to 
indicate the kind of teaching which we should give, and the kind 
which we should not give, in our Sunday Schools. Let us now 
enter somewhat into detail as to the materials and spirit of our 
instruction. 

First of all, teachers, seek to awaken in the hearts of your pupils 
a loving faith in God the Father. They are happy ; make their 
gladness gratitude. They come to you from homes where they 
are tenderly cherished. Show them God as the sole source of the 
home-blessings of which their parents are the almoners, — as Him 
who has set the else solitary in families ; who has kindled from his 
own love the love of father and of mother ; whose tenderness and 
long-suffering are but faintly shadowed by theirs ; who ever lives 
for them though earthly parents may die ; who will take them up 
if father and mother forsake them. 

They come to you on these bright summer Sundays. Like the 
Divine Teacher, draw your text from the birds of the air and the 
flowers of the field. Unfold to them the mysteries of joy that are 
around them in the songs of the woods and groves 5 in the hum 
and buzz of countless insects ever on the wing; in the gladsome 
gambols that ripple the lake and river ; in the motherly care that 
broods as a perpetual providence over the helpless young of bird 
and beast ; in the munificent provision for the needs of every form 
of sentient life ; in the inscrutable instinct which for some stores 
up nutriment for barren winter, and drives others from zone to 
zone to find in their migrations perpetual spring. Show them too 
the exhaustless wonders of the vegetable creation, — the marvel- 
lous structure of the wayside flower ; the Providence which ordains 
the winds of heaven as reapers and sowers of the seed which human 
hand neither gathers nor scatters ; the beauty-loving, joy-breathing 
spirit which hangs the wild vine, gives the forest-trees their sym- 



9 



metry and grandeur, paints the lily's cup, loads the summer air 
with fragrance, elaborates beneath the snows and the frozen soil 
the fertilizing juices that in due time renew the face of the earth, 
and crown the year with verdure and glory. 

The children come to you with fresh recollections and reminis- 
cent outbreaks of their holiday sport. Exclude it not from the 
sacred place and hour. Rather hallow it ; for God has hallowed 
it. Show them how their fingers are fitted to grasp the ball ; their 
elastic limbs adapted to their vigorous contests in running, leaping 
and athletic games ; their lungs — so large in proportion to their 
undeveloped frames — made capable of taking in more than their 
share of vitalizing and gladdening oxygen ; the muscles of the face 
so organized as to find genial expression in the sunny smile and 
the merry laugh. Let them know and feel that the fountain of 
their joy is filled and kept full by Him who loves that his children 
should be happy. Thus associate God in their thoughts with all 
that makes them glad. 

Bat forget not to teach them the law, no less than the love 
of God. Show them the ingratitude, and thus the exceeding sin- 
fulness, of sin. They know what disobedience is in their homes, 
and their keenest remorse springs, not from the experience or the 
dread of punishment, but from the consciousness of their ingrati- 
tude, and their sense of a parent's wounded love. Employ in like 
manner the goodness of God to lead them to repentance. Make 
them feel that whatever is less than pervading gratitude is sin. 
Draw them by the cords of love to obedience and self-consecration. 
Seek to attach to the Father in heaven the very sentiments which 
constantly turn to, and rest upon, and spring from the filial rela- 
tion in which most of them have so happy experience. 

But, while love produces faith no less than faith works by love, 
beware of irreverence, — of over-familiar, flippant speech about the 
Supreme Being. I have sometimes, in Sunday-Schools, in both 
address and prayer, heard the Almighty spoken of and to in a 
style and- tone altogether below that which we would assume in 
talking about or addressing a man whom we profoundly respected. 
You might sometimes infer from the mode of speech that the Su- 
preme Being was familiarly and thoroughly known by the speaker, 
almost as neighbors know one another. Now in such representa- 
tions immeasurably more than is gained in simplicity is lost in 
impressiveness. The child cannot profoundly venerate a being 
whom even his infant mind is taught that it can comprehend, and 



10 



whose name is lightly uttered, even though it be on sacred themes 
and occasions. ISTo ; let that name be uttered with awe no less than 
with love. Nay, let us even learn something from the reverent 
silence of the Hebrews, who, though they write, never speak the 
name of Jehovah. Let the utterance, though not as in their case 
superstitiously suppressed, never be needlessly multiplied, I would 
say, not even in prayer. Let the child be taught to feel that, 
while on the one side of fatherly love the Divine majesty lets it- 
self down to his feeble apprehension, in all other dimensions and 
aspects it presents heights and depths, and in this too a fulness and 
wealth, conversance with which " demands and crowns eternity." 

I want to dwell with emphasis on this point, because I believe 
that the well-meant irreverence of religious teaching is fatal to an 
enduring faith in God. The idea which seems to the child's mind 
full, complete and adequate, he outgrows and looks down upon with 
advancing years ; while if, on the one hand, he is taught to associ- 
ate all the beauty of creation and all the joy of life with the love 
of God, and, on the other hand, is made to feel, " Lo ! these are 
a part of His ways, but how little a portion is known of him ! " — 
the conception will grow with his growth, strengthen with his 
strength, deepen with his experience, ever filling, yet ever trans- 
cending his apprehensive powers, and blending lowly awe with 
filial love. 

Parallel with this loving, yet reverent instruction concerning the 
Supreme Being should be the earnest endeavor to plant in the child's 
mind, faith in Christ. If you do not believe in the very Christ of 
the gospel narratives ; if your Christ is a marred and distorted cari- 
cature of the Christ of the evangelists, a conception of your own, 
another being than that recognized by the whole Church as the 
Sent of God and the Saviour of men, — you have no rightful place 
in the Sunday School. Our churches are organized on the basis of 
the Gospel of eighteen centuries ago, not on any brand-new gospel 
of to-day. But if you believe in the veritable Christ of the evan- 
gelists, teach his whole history as if you believed it all. Present 
him to your pupils in his divine and human relations ; in all his 
loveliness and beauty ; in those mighty works in which he is the 
power of God ; in those doctrines and precepts in which he is the 
wisdom of God ; in that life spent in doing good, and that death 
for man's redemption, in which he is the love of God ; in that glo- 
rious resurrection in which he reveals immortality ; in that ascen- 
sion in which he marks in living light the way to heaven. 



11 



Show your pujDils the excellence of Christ's teachings and spirit, 
where they are opposed to the way of the world, — the greatness of 
humility, the kindly working of a forgiving temper, the blessed- 
ness of doing to others as we would have them do to us. Apply 
these precepts to the occasions — in outward seeming trivial, to 
them momentous — on which they may make trial of their Saviour's 
words, and learn from experience how wise and good they are. 
Make yourselves conversant with their peculiar temptations and 
trials, and help them to ask and answer the question, "What 
would Jesus, the sinless child, have been, or said, or done, under 
like circumstances " ? 

Content not yourselves with the scraps and shreds of the sacred 
record which your pupils may commit as the minimum answers to 
the questions in their manuals. Let them deposit in their mem- 
ory the Saviour's very words, — the parables, the Sermon on the 
Mount, the discourses at the paschal table. Memory can have no 
treasure half so precious ; and, committed early, it will be a life- 
long treasure, — nay more, in the Master's own expressive figure, it 
will be within them " a well of water springing up unto everlasting- 
life." 

Teach the gospels, if you so believe them, as you would teach 
. geography or astronomy, not with qualification or apology, as if 
they were hard to be believed, or liable to doubt. Discuss not 
with your pupils sceptical theories in which you yourselves have- 
no confidence. You may indeed answer the doubts suggested to 
your own satisfaction ; but you will have taught them to doubt 
before they have learned to believe. Accustom them, however, to 
talk freely with you ; and if doubts spring up within their own 
minds, (which is not likely to be the case,) or are suggested from 
without, (as they may be, and, I am sorry to say, even from the 
pulpit,) then meet them to the best of your ability, by sound rea- 
soning, and yet more, by what will generally have still greater 
weight, — the utterance of your own firm and hearty faith. 

Endeavor not only to teach them about Christ, but to make them 
Christians in spirit and in life, and you will have done immeasur- 
ably more for their faith, than by the most learned and able refu- 
tation of all the objections and cavils that unbelievers ever have 
urged or ever will or can urge. A Christ within is not easily 
dislodged. Christian consciousness is an armor of proof against 
all adverse influences. Your pupils may encounter scepticism in 
after life ; but its power over their minds will depend, not on their 



12 



capacity to meet argument by argument, but on the strength of 
their antecedent faith. If Christ and his Gospel have no strong- 
hold on their hearts, they will listen readily to doubt and unbelief. 
If they have learned to love Christ and follow him, their sufficient 
answer will be that of Peter, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou 
hast the words of eternal life." 

I come now to the use of the Old Testament in the instruction 
of the young. Here the materials are rich and inestimably pre- 
cious ; but they require a cautious and discriminating use. There 
are narrative portions, of value to older minds, unfolding profoundly 
instructive chapters of the providential histoiy of primeval man 
and of the covenant people, which yet contain no lessons that can 
be made directly profitable to children. There are details of the 
Mosaic ritual, which on investigation reveal more and more of the 
Divine wisdom in fencing the Hebrews against the idolatries and 
vices of surrounding nations, but which, were they availing for 
juvenile instruction, require a larger apparatus of illustration than 
is often within the reach of any but professed theologians. There 
are records of depravity, which are of priceless value as way-marks 
in the progress of mankind, and as attestations of the need of Di- 
vine interposition to raise from its fallen state a race that had lost 
the power of self-redemption ; but these narratives, though they 
are almost always striking examples of God's retributive provi- 
dence, are not adapted to the edification of the very young. 

Yet, while what is obscure or easily liable to abuse may be 
shunned, how much is there, which is not only intensely interest- 
ing to the young and curious mind, but is adapted to illustrate and 
enforce by example the very maxims of ethical truth and duty 
which fell from the lips and were incarnated in the life of Jesus ! 
In my boyhood well-nurtured children found ample and rich pastur- 
age in these Hebrew Scriptures, — not, indeed, turned into them 
to graze at random, but led by the home-shepherdess, (whose work 
the under-shepherds should help, not supersede.) where the sweet- 
est pastures grow, though often close under the shadow of those 
cliffs and crags in which are the hidings of the Divine counsels, — 
inaccessible mysteries, — holy words that pulse in magnificent 
rhythm upon the ear, yet veil instead of revealing their thought. 

The Old Testament biography has a perennial charm for those 
who have become interested in it. What a portrait gallery have 
we there, of worthies, for the least of whom, till Christ came, not 
a peer could be found out of Judea! — Abraham, the sublime old 



13 



patriarch, talking with, the angels on the plain of Mamre ; Joseph^ 
alike in the prison and near the throne. 

" Faithful found, 
Among the faithless faithful only he" : 

Moses, the mirror of patriotism, the father of an emancipated nation . 
J ob, the loyal vindicator of the ways of Providence in sackcloth^ 
penury and contempt ; Daniel, true to the God of his fathers under 
the ban of a relentless despotism : and a multitude beside, the 1ns- 
tre of whose virtue is not eclipsed, nor the aroma of their piety 
exhaled, by the lapse of uncounted ages, or the revolutions that 
have passed over their birthland, but who shine and will shine on 
as stars in the spiritual firmament forever and ever. 

Then too, in the religions culture of the taste and the imagina- 
tion, where can you find such a manual as we have in the Psalms, 
in Job, in Isaiah, in that glorious anthem of Habakkuk, in Solo- 
mon's prayer at the dedication of the Temple ? Where else does 
nature pour forth so deep and rich a voice ? Where else are the 
" signs and wonders of the elements'' so sublime in their utterance 
of praise? Where else are we so brought into communion with 
the incorruptible Spirit that is in all things, and made so to feel 
the indwelling presence of the Almighty in every work of his pow- 
er? Where else do the floods clap their hands, the hills rejoice, 
the forests wave in praise, the rain confess its Father, the vernal 
bloom own the all-renovating fiat, till, as we read, 

" The dilating soul, en wrapt, 
Transfused, into the mighty vision passing, 
As in her natural form, swells vast to heaven ? " 

Your pupils may encounter scepticism in its more subtle and in 
its coarser forms, as to these ancient records, and it will be impos- 
sible for you to anticipate doubt and cavil by any array of direct 
instruction and argument; but if you give them large and judicious- 
ly directed converse with these writings, the books themselves will 
' be their own defence. Their readers will have in their own hearts 
ample testimony to the Divine element in their authorship. 

I have thus given you some of the methods, by which the Sun- 
day-School teacher may plant and cherish faith in the young mind 
and heart, and may anticipate and avert the sceptical tendencies to 
which his pupils may be exposed in after life. But there is one 
instrumentality. I will not say more potent than all others, but I 
will say emphatically, without which all others will have little 



14 



weight, — without which all other modes of instruction are more 
likely than not to be feeble and inefficient, misguided and unwise. 
I mean the instruction of personal character, example and influ- 
ence. "For their sakes," said the Saviour, " I sanctify myself " ; 
and these words of his should be the motto of every one who pre- 
sumes to stand in his stead, and to feed the sheep or the lambs as 
his under-shepherd. I do not say that you should wait for the 
ripened maturity of the Christian character before you take your 
places as teachers. Did you wait for this, you might never feel 
yourselves worthy; for humility grows at least as rapidly as any 
other Christian virtue, and the nearer we approach our Saviour, the 
more does the lustre of the Sun of Righteousness dim the feeble 
shining of our lesser lamps. But the Christian teacher ought, at 
least, to have for the basis of his own culture the Christian aim, 
purpose and endeavor, — the settled determination to be a follower 
of the Lord. 

A holy life has in all times been the best argument for our re- 
ligion. It is emphatically so with children and youth. To give 
effect to your instructions, you must be what you teach. Your 
pupils must feel that you hold as inestimably precious the Gospel 
from which you give them lessons, — the Saviour whom you com- 
mend to their imitation, obedience and confidence. Your levity 
or irreverence, your indifference to the worship and ordinances of 
religion, your disloyait}^ to any known duty, your sins of temper, 
your offences against brotherly love, your marked deficiencies in 
Christian character, will awaken vague distrust in the truths you 
teach. On the other hand, whatever of the beauty of holiness your 
pupils behold in your lives will win their hearts for the Saviour of 
whom you have learned how to live. Let them see in you the 
blended beauty and strength of Christian manhood, the delicate, 
gentle, winning graces of Christian womanhood, — they will be 
drawn in strong sympathy and tender love to you, and through 
you to him at whose feet you sit, and whose spirit you breathe. 

Teachers, in conclusion, let me bid you Godspeed in your sacred 
work. Pursue it in faith and love, and God's blessing shall attend 
or follow it. Be not discouraged, though you see not immediate 
results. " The husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the 
earth, and hath long patience, until he receive the early and latter 
rain. Be ye also patient.' 5 You may not be able to trace your 
work to its happy issue. But in heaven each husbandman will 
know his own sheaves. Believe that for all your diligent and lov- 



15 



ing labor in the Lord's harvest-field there awaits you a blessed 
recognition in the ingathering of redeemed souls. There you will 
rind children of your faith and your adoption, bound to you by ties 
of eternal benefit, who will say to you, " You helped us hither; you 
shone as a light upon our path; your instructions were the life of 
our souls ; your example brought us to the Saviour," Teachers, 
may this be the reward and blessedness of all of you in the resur- 
rection of the just ! 



